Promoting reading 1
film versions, theatrical dramatisations and stag
ed readings of the book. The One Book programme has become particularly widespread in the USA, Canada and UK. Fuller and Sedo have no precise statistics, but estimate that more than five hundred OBOC programmes exist worldwide. Mass Reading Events have their apologists and their detractors. The phenomenon has been met with everything from enthusiastic exclamations in style of “reading is the new rock n’ roll” to not quite so rapturous comparisons with the collective consumption of fast food. American literature professor Harold Bloom is in the latter camp. In Mass Reading Events, Fuller and Sedo see a social and cultural phenomenon that both reproduces and shapes ideas about what reading may involve. To reading as an individually transforming, educative, existential, therapeutic, creative or even civilising experience, with the renewed interest in social reading on a mass scale you can add yet another aspect: reading as a means of building communities. A commonly occurring variant of the OBOC model is One City One Book. In Sweden, for example, there are such events for the cities of Stockholm, Uppsala and Gothenburg: Stockholm läser, Uppsala läser and Göteborg läser. Author Helena Sigander was the initiator of Stockholm läser, which started in 2002. She also ran the project from 2002 to 2008. Her inspiration came from the USA, where similar events exist in a number of cities. This intiative enjoys the support of the Swedish Arts Council and the City of Stockholm, and since 2011 Författarcentrum (the Writers’ Centre) and Stockholm City Library are responsible for the project. One criterion for a Stockholm läser book is that its plot takes place at least in part in Stockholm, or is written by a writer with clear ties to Stockholm. The project began in 2002 with Hjalmar Söderberg’s Doctor Glas, and with only a short break has continued on an annual basis since then. OBOC programmes may also cover entire regions or provinces, for example the province of Norrbotten in Norrbotten läser. The OBOC programme includes a guessing competition on Facebook about the choice of book for the year, which is announced on World Book Day –the theme day established by UNESCO in 1995 as 23rd April each year – and also includes tours by the author of the selected book. A further example is that of Hela Halland läser, where participants are initially invited to come forward with suggestions for a book whose author either lives in or writes fiction about, the province of Halland. One of the objectives of the project Umeåregionen läser is specifically to strengthen the status of local literature. Author visits Author visits for the purpose of reading promotion occur in the form of individual events and also as part of various types of reading promotion programmes and projects, both within Sweden and abroad. In a similar way to book circles, author visits may be either IRL or digital. For example, as a digital substitute for IRL author visits, the British website Behind the Bookshelf offers short films of interviews with famous writers about their writing. The book Programming author visits (Watkins 1996) claims that author visits are one of the best ways to generate or intensify curiosity about books among children and young people – even if no actual evidence in support of this claim is presented. Each year, approximately 2,500 author visits are conducted in Swedish classrooms, 76